Mount and Blade

There will doubtless be some of you who are familiar with M&B through way of the Napoleonic Wars mod for Warband which has fairly recently exploded in popularity with the Line Battle events hosted regularly and a large enough player base to make these a lot of fun. However I would like to talk more about the single player and also about M&B itself rather than the official Warband release.

I have been playing M&B since the days of yore, version 0.606 to be specific. I have seen the game grown from tiny husband and wife programming team in Turkey to a multinational group releasing boxed copies (when I started you downloaded the trial and then bought a serial key from their site if you liked it). I am immensely proud of what has been achieved by Taleworlds in bringing us this game and even more proud of the community who made it what it is through tireless beta modding starting before the game was even out of alpha.

Enough crap from me now.

If you've never heard of M&B then the name should prove rather informative, you have a horse and a sword and within 2 minutes of starting the game it's very likely you will be using both of them. There is more to it of course. For equipping armour and weapons you are presented with an inventory screen reminiscent of Icewind Dale and its successors, a small model of yourself that you may equip by placing things in the appropriate slots there are probably 30 or so melee weapons from pikes to war axes to swords and halbards and about 6 bows of progressive damage, range, accuracy and fire rate. Armour is varied and consists of around 20 variations of each piece and ranges from plain shirts to chain and finally full plate, shields are also readily available and there are about 30 different types offering a range of uses to suit your play style.

After a small intro in which you pick your backstory via several basic options (these do have noticeable effects on what equipment and skill points you start with), you are taken to the player creation screen, such as it is. Compared to games like Skyrim this is a laughable little thing, but really it's a very unimportant aspect of the game as you spend most of the time kitted up in as much metal as you can stick to your face.

You are given points to spend on attributes (such as tracking, tactics, inventory management, surgery etc) and weapon skills (two handed, one handed, bow, crossbow, thrown, polearm). These can make a substantial difference to your opening stats but the game is very flexible and within 30 minutes you can have leveled up enough to effectively re-do your stats anyway.

The premise, once this is done, is that you will ride about the charming land of Calradia with your merry band of murderous thugs and do whatever you want. Seriously. This game makes no attempt to force you to be a good knight serving a lord, though it can be profitable and enjoyable to do exactly that. You can make yourself a bandit lord, robbing the caravans which roam between cities on the campaign map, defeating lords and selling their men as slaves. Or you can go merchant yourself, buying various goods where prices are low and selling in other cities where they are high, there are attributes that can help you in any playstyle.

One of the most engaging features, which both adds a level of tactics and also opens the door for merchant type players, or for people who just like ordering men to their death, is the command system. Your troops are automatically divided into infantry, archers and cavalry and you can add more categories if you like such as spears or multiple cavalry units. These groups are hotkeyed to numbers 1,2 and 3 respectively and any groups you add will go sequentially from there. Once you have selected the group(s) you wish to command you have a range of orders such as retreat 10 paces, advance 10 paces, charge (which the AI will default to, and do a perfectly good job if you leave them alone) and so on. You can spread them out or bring them closer (perfect for making shield walls against archer-heavy opponents, order them to use blunt weapons only (capturing prisoners to enslave) and many other things.

That is, I think, enough for now. There are a million other things I could go into and the game is so complex and intricate that these will draw you in and never will you want to leave, but you can discover them yourself. I do consider myself a master of this game, having logged well over 1500 hours since I started, any questions will be happily answered.

Though I only spent 450 hours on this game, I can only say that this game is worth the money you spend to buy it ! This is the game I played the most, for sure.I can't give any detail information like you did because my english is not good enough but I'll just add a few things.

It's too bad indeed that we always start in the ambush, saving the merchant brother - though we can tell him to fuck off. There should be other beginnings considering what background you have chosen ! If you're a veteran soldier then you should be part of a battle as soon as the game begins, and for any reason you find yourself alone with a "starter-kit" (The equipment of a "Tier 2" soldier depending on the faction you have chosen). That could be great to have even more options.

As you said, there are plenty of mods and that's somehow what keeps the community alive and fresh. We could talk about Mount & Musket (Now a DLC), Diplomacy, Europe 1200 and many other, adding even more depth to the game.And hell yeah this game is deep ! As you said there is plenty of different equipement and that is quite enjoyable to see !

The multiplayer is also awesome. When you go to the duel servers you can find people of such a skill level ! I mean, wow ! These guys are pros.It's also very funny to play multiplayer mods like Persistant World but only with a bunch of friends role-playing rioting peasants haha !

The ambush you're talking about is in Warband, I find it slightly annoying but only because I've done it so many times, for first time players it's useful I think.

KiwwHi wrote:

It's too bad indeed that we always start in the ambush, saving the merchant brother - though we can tell him to fuck off. There should be other beginnings considering what background you have chosen ! If you're a veteran soldier then you should be part of a battle as soon as the game begins, and for any reason you find yourself alone with a "starter-kit" (The equipment of a "Tier 2" soldier depending on the faction you have chosen). That could be great to have even more options.

Funny you should say that actually, there was a mod called Mount&Gladius or something similar which was set in Rome and depending what intro line you picked you would either start on the barbarian or roman side of a skirmish (and as different types of soldiers), or as a slave or slave owner during a slave rebellion. It was quite a nice touch.

KiwwHi wrote:

As you said, there are plenty of mods and that's somehow what keeps the community alive and fresh. We could talk about Mount & Musket (Now a DLC), Diplomacy, Europe 1200 and many other, adding even more depth to the game.

Mount&Musket started out as several mods like the Eagle and the Radiant Cross and another I can't remember. Fun fact: all the script for the first guns in M&B came from a single modder named Yoshi who made them for his Pirates mod, which also introduced naval travel and ship boarding battles, those were really cool. This was in version .751 I think, so very early, the community modders really helped the developers, we gave them a lot of cool ideas that they used to improve the game for us.

KiwwHi wrote:

The multiplayer is also awesome. When you go to the duel servers you can find people of such a skill level ! I mean, wow ! These guys are pros.It's also very funny to play multiplayer mods like Persistant World but only with a bunch of friends role-playing rioting peasants haha

I'm gonna come off all "back in my day" here; multiplayer wasn't even an idea until Warband and even then it was the need to sell more to cover the cost of Paradox's publishing fee than anything. For ages we'd all been playing single player and then talking about our adventures in this shared world, it really tied the community together and we had a really great time talking about tactics and fun classes to play as and everything that we had done that we thought people might be interested to hear.

The Persistent World mod is awesome, I play occasionally with friends, the clans are pretty well organised and the number of bandit players is high enough to make the game interesting but not so high that it wrecks it. I haven't played many duels but yeah, I've seen some really good guys just cut you to pieces in a second.

I'm expecting quite a good show from Bannerlord, the game has certainly come a long way. I was there when the total forum population was no more than a few hundred and almost everyone who played was on the forum, now thousands of people play and videos of it attract 100k+ views.

I have strange views on this game. Game is great and everything. One of the best.

This is where I find communities ruin the game though. For a long time cRPG was in rule (no idea what it is like now). At the start cRPG was great. It gave you tons of item choices and some stats. 250 player servers which looked chaotic. Huge charges and collections of people working together to form shield walls and attempt tactics.

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Over time though cRPG ditched the big server and littered the entire server list with about 20 servers. Maxing out at 64 players? Most of them seemed to be 32 players. It became hard to find a normal server with large battles because the segregated the entire Warband community.

Furthermore the attitude of players seemed to become real iffy. These guys are honestly claiming they have skill at the game when they have the best armor, the best weapon and a ton of stats. The chat was disgusting at times where I thought there was some gigantic fat kid in a rich mansion with a hyper lisp and inability to do anything without so much as 2 manservants. It wasn't vulgar. It was just that these guys honestly thought they were playing 'well'.

Mount and blade already has 2 handed issues. You can swing in such a way to cut your opponents down without so much as giving them a chance to retaliate. Since 2 handed weapons swing on par with 1 handed weapons. Feigning is instantaneous and has no drawbacks so you can spam feign until your opponent releases their guard. It slightly ruins combat.

Granted most people will say "2 handed weapons mean no shield". You can still carry a shield on your back however. Even so though. It just isn't fun and it doesn't look like fighting.

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Individual combat wise the game is kinda silly but it feels very kickass when fighting large battles. If people didn't try to abuse the games mechanics in order to be good ( which is essentially every game ever ) I'd probably still play it now and then. It's still an amazing game though. New Mount and Blade 2? I wonder how it will be ruined by it's popularity though. What features will be hacked off. How will the game be simplified for idiots? =)

In all honesty, multiplayer doesn't bother me. I really only play singleplayer and I'd like to clarify just one more time I'm not talking about Warband, which I don't like as much as the original.

I haven't heard much of cRPG, can you explain a bit more about it please?

The 2H block/parry time was a fairly serious balancing issue that got overlooked for the Warband purchase. You're right about having the shield on your back, that was only properly introduced a little while earlier so I guess they just didn't think of it.

Last edited by Wunel on Sat Feb 02, 2013 4:30 pm; edited 1 time in total

I still prefer mount and blade to medieval chivalry. War of the Roses seems better in place, worse in blocking to mount and blade.

I would like some more realistic combat. The main issue is the movement whilst attacking. You can move quite easily WASD in any direction whilst charging up an attack. Which means your lower body and upper body are acting as two complete separate entities. If they could create a combat game where that is not the case then I think we'd have some more interesting cinematic hollywood style battles. Like Braveheart!

I still prefer mount and blade to medieval chivalry. War of the Roses seems better in place, worse in blocking to mount and blade.

I would like some more realistic combat. The main issue is the movement whilst attacking. You can move quite easily WASD in any direction whilst charging up an attack. Which means your lower body and upper body are acting as two complete separate entities. If they could create a combat game where that is not the case then I think we'd have some more interesting cinematic hollywood style battles. Like Braveheart!

Yes, that's been a rather enduring feature of hack/slash games, the circling with WASD and attacking at the same time. The problem with implementing a system that restricts that is that it tends to feel cumbersome and, ironically, realistic in a way which people don't enjoy. Much like GTA IV suffered from over-realism.

For some reason I still haven't played Napoleonic, I have it sitting there on my computer though. I think I was put off by the original gun mods like Fire and Sword, but I've been meaning to give it a go. I'll post up here when I get around to it, might record some videos too.